In recent years, electronic commerce (EC) has been rapidly gaining popularity and in some regions, the “electronic signature law” has come into existence in order to generate the legal binding force to the electronic commerce. In the present foreign trade procedures, the bill of lading issued by a shipping company is handled as securities to which the subject cargo is transformed, and the owner of the bill of lading has the right to finally receive the cargo from the shipping company at the importing country side.
In this way, in the present laws and treaties, the bill of lading is premised to be prepared in writing, and the computerized documents of the bill of lading are unable to have legal protection as the bill of lading. As a method for computerizing these foreign trade procedures and bringing them under the legal protection, a method for binding all the people related to trading with one rule. By this method, participants must have the public key certificate issued by the same certification authority (CA). In general, the certification authority issues the certificate of the public key corresponding to the private key which an individual, a company, etc. only possesses, and controls the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the certificate. When the electronic signature utilizing the public key certificate is used for actual transaction, the certification authority must confirm that the subject really exists. To confirm the real existence of the subject, the certification authority which is geographically located near the subject and can actually confirm the real existence of the subject is advantageous, and it is difficult for one certification authority to certify the subject that extends internationally. In addition, the competent court should any problems occur is restricted to one place. Furthermore, there is a problem in that there is no standard competitive environment for carrying out electronic foreign trade procedures.
As one of the concepts for solving these problems, there is a concept of Route CA. The route CA is a scheme to certify other certification authority with a specific certification authority serving as a route. However, there is no international rule which has been standardly agreed on the electronic signature, and we are still in the state in which the framework for electronically carrying out all the trade transactions that have a special side called electronic commerce extending internationally has not yet been prepared.